Washington County Enterprise-Leader
Team Recommends District Accreditation
FARMINGTON — After a four-day comprehensive evaluation last week, a fivemember review team with AdvancED is recommending that the Farmington School District once again receive district wide accreditation.
AdvancED is the nation’s largest educational accreditation organization and serves 30,000 schools in the United States and more than 65 countries. According to the AdvancED website, the organization’s goal is to provide guiding principles and effective practices for continuous school improvement.
The Farmington School District was one of the first districts in the state to receive AdvancED accreditation five years ago. District accreditation lasts for five years and the review team came in for a “brand new look” to make sure the district was continuing to focus on school improvement, said team leader Agnes Smith of Mobile, Ala.
“It’s all about taking what is good and making it even better and doing that every year and every day we come to school on behalf of the students,” Smith told the Farmington School Board last Wednesday in a special meeting to present the review team’s findings.
A long-time educator with experience as a teacher and principal, Smith now works for the University of South Alabama. Her four team members came from the Pocahontas, Neddleton and Searcy County school districts in Arkansas and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
After going through the review team’s findings, Smith said it was the consensus of the five to recommend Farmington for accreditation to the AdvancED Accreditation Commission.
“Job well done, indeed,” Smith told the board members and school administrators.
AdvancED accreditation is based on five standards: vision and purpose, governance and leadership, teaching and assessing for learning, resources and support systems, and using results for continuous learning.
Prior to the visit, Farmington submitted a detailed written report with evidence on how the district believed it was meeting the criteria for district accreditation.
Smith’s team arrived Sunday, Dec. 2, and quickly went to work. Over the course of the four days, the five educators talked to 19 administrators, four school board members, 44 teachers, 17 support staff, 28 parents and 55 students. They visited 30 classrooms across the district.
They used these interviews and observations to validate the district’s selfassessment.
The team’s exit report rated Farmington on how it was meeting each of the five standards with a point system that ranged from a “1” for work needs to be done to a “4,” which stands for perfection. Most districts receive 2s and 3s, Smith said, with all districts striving to earn the almost impossible 4 rating.
Farmington’s ratings ranged from 2.75 to a high of 3.33.
“Based on our homework, interviews, classroom observations and deliberations, overall, you’ve done just very, very well,” Smith said.
The review also looks at the district’s learning environment and Smith commended the school for scoring high in those areas. She in particular pointed to a school environment that is well-managed with high expectations learning.
The team issued three commendations or what it termed “powerful practices”:
• A commitment to professional learning communities.
• Excellent stewardship of district resources.
• Relationships established within the district.
The exit report included one required action and two other areas with opportunities for improvement:
• To revise and restructure the school district’s vision, “To be the best school district in Arkansas,” so that it reflects a clear direction for improvements.
• To involve the district’s stakeholders to a greater degree.
• To include more teachers in training programs to analyze and interpret data.
Superintendent Bryan Law thanked the accreditation team for its work and report. He said the school’s 200- page self- assessment was the result of administrators, staff and teachers all working together. The required action and other opportunities for improvement were all areas that the school district identified in its own report for the review, Law said.
He noted that the district’s vision statement “to be the best school district in the state” is very general and does not have “a lot of meat” to it.
“We’ve already talked about this and we want to have goals for this, like following a road map,” Law said after the board meeting.
Farmington will receive a written report from the review in about 30 days and the recommendation for accreditation will go before the AdvancED Commission in June 2013.
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